Budapest: A History of Grandeur and Catastrophe

By Joe Hajdu

Budapest today is a palimpsest of its history and partially crystallized present. Its earlier history is best seen on the Castle Hill of Buda, the seat of Hungarian royal power since the beginning in the 13th Century. This peaked in the glory years of King Matthias' reign in the second half of the 15th Century, when Buda was one of the largest and wealthiest cities of Europe. The Ottoman conquest that followed a generation later was a catastrophe whose effect would last two centuries. However when the new Castle Hill of Buda arose, it became a version of Baroque central Europe, controlled by Imperial Vienna. Pest, on the opposite banks of the Danube, is a symbol of the grandeur of the late 19th Century metropolis. Elaborate, historicist buildings and monuments first inhabited by the members of the rising bourgeoisie that had achieved prosperity in the booming Budapest around the year 1900. This era still largely defines the visual appearance of the central city. Nearly half a century later Fascism, and then forty years of Communism, again produced economic dislocation and social tumult in the lives of the people. This is best shown through descriptions of the fate of individual families in Budapest. Since 1990 the metropolis and its people have gone through a frenzied transition for which there was no template: authoritarian socialist economy to volatile capitalism and democracy. The story of the key players and groups in this transition make this tumultuous process particularly vivid. Today Budapest is a city whose role in Europe is still being crystallized. However, inventive entrepreneurs and creative artists are making the city a more and more vibrant home for its citizens and a favoured destination for a rapidly increasing flow of visitors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jul 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9781528975193

Joe Hajdu

Dr. Joe Hajdu is a cultural geographer. He is attached to Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia as an Honorary Fellow. In a long academic career he has carried out research in Australia, Germany, and the United Kingdom. His previous books have included a cultural geographic study of Australia aimed at visitors who seek to immerse themselves into the topic beyond what the standard tourist guide provides, a description of the cultural impact of the Japanese on the Gold Coast in northeast Australia in the 1980s, a study of the effect on economic linkages and people's lives of the West-East German border prior to 1989, and a recent book on the transformation of Berlin after 1990 from being a marginalized, divided city to again being the capital and culturally vibrant metropolis of a reunited Germany. Budapest: A History of Grandeur and Catastrophe is his first research and book project carried out in his birthplace, Hungary.

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Bibliography

About the Author

Dr. Joe Hajdu is a cultural geographer. He is attached to Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia as an Honorary Fellow. In a long academic career he has carried out research in Australia, Germany, and the United Kingdom. His previous books have included a cultural geographic study of Australia aimed at visitors who seek to immerse themselves into the topic beyond what the standard tourist guide provides, a description of the cultural impact of the Japanese on the Gold Coast in northeast Australia in the 1980s, a study of the effect on economic linkages and people’s lives of the West-East German border prior to 1989, and a recent book on the transformation of Berlin after 1990 from being a marginalized, divided city to again being the capital and culturally vibrant metropolis of a reunited Germany. Budapest: A History of Grandeur and Catastrophe is his first research and book project carried out in his birthplace, Hungary.

Copyright Information

Copyright © Joe Hajdu (2015)

The right of Joe Hajdu to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78455 218 3 (paperback

ISBN 978 1 78455 219 0 (Kindle)

ISBN 978 1 52897 519 3 (ePub)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published (2015)

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd.

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Acknowledgments

The idea for this book has been floating around in my head for quite some time, but other writing projects took precedence, until my wife Judy must have felt nothing would ever happen and started muttering: ‘You should really start working on a Budapest book. That city was an important part of your life. Also, that will give us an excuse to spend longer times there than we have until now.’ That did it. I’d often felt I would really like to spend more time in Budapest to explore it in greater detail and try to immerse myself in its complexities. Earlier visits to the city had meant meeting relatives and friends. Outside this circle I had never really had more than superficial contact with Hungarians. Working on this book gave that opportunity, and through these discussions with people I had sought out, I have gained a great deal of information on Budapest and benefited from these people’s experiences, insights and opinions. These discussants have also given me something less specific: they have given me a better sense of the psyche of the Budapest person, their feelings, hopes and fears, not to mention a sense of the touches of that bittersweet Budapest irony to which I have always been partial.

So firstly I would like express my thanks to the people in Budapest who agreed to give me of their time so generously and entered into a detailed discussion with me about the issues which I had raised with them, and sharpened my awareness of many things about the city that previously I had only dimly sensed. In some cases they also gave me specialised literature which was freighted back to Australia and so made a valuable contribution to the richness of the story that follows. My discussants (in alphabetical order) are: Gábor Aczél, Tamás Antalffy, Antal Arato, Gábor Demszky, Tamás Egedy, József Finta, Gábor Gaylhoffer, Viktor Iro, György Kévés and his partner Eva Földváry, Gábor Nándor, Gábor Székely, Szabolcs Szita, Iván Tosics and András Török. I thank them all most sincerely.

There is another group of people who have facilitated my book project, not specifically through an interview, but through various other ways. For example, by being the intermediary between me and an interviewee, making me aware of sources of information or helping me collect information, helping me access historical photographs and their transmission by computer, or in casual conversation giving me clues that set me thinking about issues I had not previously considered or that led to new sources of information. In this way, they have been most helpful in the furtherance of this book project. They are: Elayne Antalffy, János Borbély, Miklós Bordács, Ferenc Herczeg, Judit Jórend, Rita Katz, Sandor Szakály and János Váti.

I hope that none of these people I have mentioned will be disappointed with my book.

Finally, my wife Judy definitely deserves another mention. Apart from being very supportive of this whole project, more specifically, she has encouraged me to bounce ideas off her that have made my text more interesting. She has also been of great help in the word processing of the manuscript, and been an invaluable help with the proofreading of the text. Nagyon szépen köszönöm!

Sources of the illustrations

Plates 1.1 & 2.1 Országos Széchényi Könyvtár;

Plates 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 2.4 & 6.2 Budapest Antikvárium;

Plates 2.2, 2.3, 3.1 & 4.2 Kiscelli Muzeum;

Plates 5.2, 6.3, 10.4 & 11.4 Médiaszolgáltatás-támogató és Vagyonkezelö Alap (MTVA);

Plates 2.5, 2.6, 2.7, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 4.1 4.3, 4.4, 5.1, 5.3, 5.4, 6.1, 6.4, 6.5, 7.1, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5, 9.1, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.5, 10.6, 10.7, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3, 11.5, 11.6 & 11.7 Joe Hajdu.

Map of Budapest

Legend:

Matthias Church and Fishermen’s Bastion

Royal Palace

Gellert Hill

Széchényi Chain Bridge

Parliament House

Opera House

St. Stephen’s Basilica

National Museum

Heroes Square and Millenium Monument

Introduction

Budapest has been somewhere in my mind all my life. For most of us the memories of childhood are usually fragmentary and blurred, yet these blurred memories often contain some scenes of surprising sharpness that have embedded themselves into our psyche. How can we tell the extent to which they have helped form our opinions, prejudices and secret fears? I can only hope to surmise what the experiences of my early years have done to me.

For the first five and a half years of my life I spent long periods in our apartment in Budapest. I remember it as a modern, bright, airy place with a balcony on the first floor of a small block, with a lawn and a few flowers between the front door and the gate leading to the footpath on the street. Standing on the balcony and looking to one side, I recall some hills in the distance. They must have been the Buda Hills, and looking the other way, I have a vague sense of flatness and buildings half hidden by trees. But it is specific images and specific experiences of Wartime Budapest which are etched most deeply into my memory.

It was the summer of 1944 and the tide of war had definitely turned in favour of the Allies. For most people nocturnal bombing raids on Budapest by Allied bombers had become part of daily life. I would go to bed and be just starting to slide into my slumber when the piercing wail of the air raid sirens would wake me up with a jolt, or my mother or father would race into the bedroom and shake me to wake up and hurriedly pull me down with them into the cellar. As we raced down the stairs there were mumblings about that ‘foolhardy woman’ in the apartment above us who refused to go down into the cellar. She claimed she knew better, and said that she would only seek shelter if there was real danger (during the siege of Budapest the building was damaged by fire, but I have never found out if on that occasion the woman upstairs did go down into the cellar or not). The air raids would last for the best part of the night, so it was usually by the light of dawn that we were able to climb the stairs back up to our apartment. There was one occasion during that summer which I remember quite specifically: the bombers had come, and down in the cellar the noise of the exploding bombs and air pressure vibrations that followed them seem to have been particularly severe; eventually they ceased, it was still again outside and it was safe to go back up. We entered the apartment and walked across the living room onto the balcony. It was dawn and looking towards the Pest side of the Danube River the sky was streaked a bright red and grey. Ah, my father said, it looks as if they’ve really hit the factories and shipyards on Csepel Island (in the Danube) this time.

As much as they could, people tried to continue living normal lives, but the reminders that life was not normal kept intruding. One day my mother and I were walking in a park not far from our apartment. It was a sunny afternoon and there were quite a few people strolling on the paths and enjoying the ambience of the park. That afternoon the place was like an oasis of peace in a wartime city. I remember casually watching the people walking past until something caught my eye. Some of the men and women I saw had a yellow star sewn onto their jacket or blouse. I had no idea what the yellow star meant and why these people had it on their clothes. I couldn’t help but ask my mother. This afternoon as always, she chattered away in her usual manner, but on hearing my question she suddenly leant over towards me, lowered her voice and said: They are Jews, that’s why. I don’t remember whether I pursued the matter any further. I suspect an answer at this level would have satisfied the curiosity of a five-year-old.

By the late autumn of 1944 the front-line between the German army and the advancing Soviet forces was moving inexorably closer to Budapest. The German high command had decided to make Budapest a fortress that they were determined to hold at all cost. This meant that the Soviet siege of the city was going to be long and bloody. We had already left the family estate in eastern Hungary to escape the fighting and now we were getting ready to flee again. Petrol was not to be had for private use under any circumstances, so using our car was out of the question. My father had organised that a number of our horses from the estate be brought to Budapest and accommodated in stables on the Pest side of the river. It was now 4th of November, the Russian army was approaching Budapest, and we had decided to flee westwards by horse and carriage. My father, two brothers and a hired hand from the estate went to get the horses and carriages. They would drive them across one of the Danube River bridges, bring them to our Buda home and we would then pack what we could and set off the next day. As it happened, the bridge they had used to cross the Danube was the Margaret Bridge at the northern end of central Budapest. It was midday and the bridge was packed with pedestrians, trams, carriages, buses and cyclists. My father and his party crossed the bridge and were two or three hundred meters away from it on the Buda side when they heard a huge explosion. They swung around and saw that the Margaret Bridge had been blown sky high. Close to two hundred people lost their lives, the exact total has never been established. As part of their strategy to slow the Soviet advance the Germans had mined all the bridges across the Danube. It was claimed that gas leaking from a pipeline on the bridge had ignited the gunpowder, but there were also rumours that members of the anti-German resistance in Budapest had set off the charges; we will never know. My mother and I heard the noise of the shattering explosion in our apartment, and had an agonising half hour or so wondering whether we would see the rest of the family again.

We did set off the next morning and I remember sitting next to my parents in one of the carriages as the horses’ hooves clip-clopped through the outer suburbs of Budapest. When we reached the open country my father turned around to look at the Buda hills retreating towards the horizon. He nudged my mother and said: Turn around and have a last look. I’m sure you won’t see Budapest again.

He was quite right, she didn’t see Budapest again. As for me, two decades later, after having grown-up in the Antipodes, I did see Budapest again. I went there in July 1965 and was shocked by what I saw. There was an all pervading greyness about the city. One had to look behind the peeling stucco and paint to detect the past grandeur of its major buildings. Budapest had not really overcome its wounds from the siege of the winter of 1944-45 when the bloody 1956 revolution occurred. Even in the early 1960s battle scars and bullet holes were a common sight, and the faces of the people were like a parchment on which one could read the hardship and sorrow they had experienced in the preceding couple of decades. I stayed with a friend and his parents. They were very hospitable to me, and so I wanted to buy them a present of some sort. There wasn’t much to be had in the shops. I finally found a plastic water jug which I thought my friend’s mother might find useful. Well, when I gave it to her, she was absolutely thrilled. She treated it like some rare, precious memento of my visit. The family lived in a large double-storey Buda villa whose owner had left and it was now subdivided into a number of small flats. The dwelling was in a shocking state of disrepair. The main room in which my friend and his parents lived made me gasp: the ceiling was sagging dangerously, and to prevent it collapsing, two strategically placed timber columns had been inserted into the central part of the room. You had to duck and weave around these columns when going from the table to the couch/bed or to open a window. It was this room and everything it said about Budapest that I remembered most vividly from my return visit to the city as a young adult.

Since then fifty years have passed, and needless to say, much has changed in Budapest. The city today is very different, and the signs of its recent transformation, achievements and problems are there to see: the large number of statues, memorials, monuments, wall plaques and street names that show a determined desire to remember events and to honour people involved in the sharp twists and turns of Hungarian history; the stately and ornate buildings of Budapest’s glory years the roofs and walls of some now herald the arrival of capitalism through large advertisers billboards; the gleaming new hotels on the riverfront for the well-healed foreign business person and tourist; a colourful café life that strikes an echo of the ‘old Budapest’; the attractive landscaping of the pedestrianized streets in the centre; the large new arts centre with its rich cultural fare on the banks of the Danube; young people from all over Europe and beyond crowding into one of the city’s numerous improvised bars; the plethora of small shops that seem to exist more on hope than profit; peeling stucco and paint on old apartment buildings that say something about the poverty of their residents; the strikingly numerous pawn shops in many parts of the city; homeless men on some park benches and in alcoves of buildings arranging their meagre belongings to convey a sense of permanence; the sight of new office complexes and designer label shops that show their owners’/financiers’ faith in the future of the city; the large prefabricated housing estates on its fringe, and the increasing number of new villas discreetly half-hidden on wooded hillsides and in verdant hollows in the more desirable locations of the city.

Budapest today is all this and more. It is a city trying to come to terms with the inheritance of its recent history, while not being quite certain what its place will be in the Europe of the 21st Century. It is a uniquely interesting place, at the same time the experience of the convulsions that have rocked it during the last hundred years it shares with the likes of Prague, Warsaw, Belgrade and Bucharest. In 1989-90 all these cities experienced the implosion of the socialist system. Many of the people living in these cities believed that somehow this would herald a return to ‘normalcy’. Their idea of normalcy was the erasure of socialist internationalism and a longing for a return to their old national culture combined with contemporary West European standards of living and social security. However, the world doesn’t work like that. Over forty years of socialist dictatorship had a major impact on the institutions, the society, the political culture, economy, not to mention the attitudes and behaviour of the people living in these countries. When socialism ended the initial widespread euphoria was quickly followed by the sobering realisation that becoming like an Austria, West Germany or France in a few short years was an illusion. The adjustment to a new world would take much longer than that.

Many people who had only known east European socialism were not ready for the psychological readjustment required for the world of competitive capitalism. There were some people who did quickly perceive that new skills were now needed to succeed and used the collapse of the socialist order and the legal, institutional and moral chaos that followed to apply their entrepreneurial skills for legitimate business purposes or the most dubious financial ends. Such blatant acts of financial criminality did not help the new, freely elected, largely inexperienced national and local governments to establish institutions and develop and conduct policies that would guide the transition from socialism to a free market economy and democratic institutions. At the same time, while these eastern European countries were going through these tumultuous changes, their neighbours in western Europe were themselves being increasingly challenged by the pressures of globalisation, particularly the rise of Asian competitors with more flexible labour markets and lower costs. In the early 1990s German, Austrian and French companies quickly saw Warsaw, Prague and Budapest as a low-cost site to manufacture their products. But twenty years later, with the lure of an even cheaper China, Thailand, Turkey and India, the economic attractiveness of eastern Europe is less obvious.

A large city like Budapest today encapsulates many of these issues and problems of the tumultuous transition from socialism to the globalised free enterprise world. It is also a major European metropolis, and the capital of a country with a proud, distinctive culture that makes it a uniquely fascinating place. So an account of Budapest is both worthwhile for its own sake as well as for the insight it provides into the cultural-economic processes that have affected the eastern half of the European continent during the last two and a half decades.

This book does not purport to be a comprehensive history of Budapest, a number of other writers have undertaken that task in an admirable manner. But to understand the present one cannot ignore some aspects of the past. One has to start with the historic core of Budapest. This is the small castle district of Buda, perched on top of a prominent hilltop, close to the western banks of the Danube. This settlement was and still is a unique place that is quite separate from the rest of the metropolis and visible from many parts of inner Budapest. Because of its historic and symbolic importance, no account of Budapest would be complete without an account of its appearance, role in the history of the city, and the lives of some of the people who have lived there and its role in the Budapest of today.

However it was the tumultuous growth Budapest experienced from the second half of the 19th Century to the outbreak of the First World War that have made the city what it is today. For reasons which I will attempt to make clear, those were the formative years of modern Budapest. Despite two world wars, revolutions, widespread destruction and reconstruction, and numerous changes of regime, the imprint set by the 1867-1914 period still defines much of the city that visitors see. Where more recent developments have occurred, their architectural style is no doubt different, but they have been inserted into a spatial and configurative pattern set during the modern city’s formative era. It is only in the outer districts, such as on their route from Ferihegy Airport into central Budapest, that the visitor will be aware of new urban shapes and forms dominating the landscape. For example, old village buildings having been overwhelmed by housing estates and warehouses, freeways cutting through residential suburbs, or a shopping mall that is a modest version of what is found in suburban Chicago, London or Melbourne.

The grandeur of Budapest in its glory days at the beginning of the 20th Century was found in the central city on the Pest side of the Danube. The impressive, public buildings, the neoclassical, Neo-Renaissance and historicist apartment blocks, the boulevards, the numerous cafés, restaurants, and theatres were the milieu of the rising middle class of Budapest. Nagykörut, or the Grand Boulevard and its tangential Andrássy út became the most prestigious addresses of this haute bourgeoisie. The buildings there today still attest to the past presence of this social group. A chapter will describe the world of fin-de-siècle Budapest and the life of a family that enjoyed its privileges and give glimpses of the poverty and squalor that existed behind it. It must also be said a few progressive public figures did attempt to improve the lives of this large working class. The Wekerle garden city project on the outskirts of Budapest will be explored as an example of this endeavour.

The catastrophe of the First World War changed everything for Hungary. Much of the optimism was gone, and the financial situation of many members of the middle class became much more precarious. World War Two was a new convulsion for Hungary, particularly for the many Jewish members of Budapest’s bourgeoisie and its poorer orthodox brethren. A chapter will introduce the rich and diverse world of Jewish Budapest and through the lives of a number of its members describe the catastrophe that befell them in 1944-45. Hungary, allied to Nazi Germany, was again on the losing side of the War and paid the price. Soviet occupation led to the imposition of a Communist dictatorship, and this time it was its political opponents and members of the old Hungarian upper and middle classes that were its main victims. Using newly compiled information, a chapter will describe the story of the fate of large groups of Budapest’s aristocratic and bourgeois families during the 1948-53 period.

Budapest under socialism did not stand still. While the old building heritage of inner Budapest was largely left as was, large prefabricated housing estates were built on the fringes of the city to deal with the housing shortage and accommodate the flow of people into the metropolis who came to work in its expanding machinery plants, chemical factories and shipyards. Today these housing estates are still home to a surprisingly large part of the population of Budapest. So the role they play in the life of the city and how they have been adapted to changing expectations and needs, belongs to any study of the metropolis.

The implosion of the Communist dictatorship and the negotiated transfer of power to a subsequently democratically elected government in 1989-90 occurred with a suddenness that surprised most Hungarians. This process was mirrored at every level of government, including in the city of Budapest. Though the distinct politico/ administrative organs of the metropolitan city government had continued to exist during the forty years of the socialist regime, power was centralized in the hands of the national Communist Party Central Committee. Hence issues of the division of responsibility and power were largely irrelevant. This meant that the tumultuous change to democracy in Budapest brought issues of governance to the fore, coupled with the division of public assets among different levels of government, and then their possible private sale. At the same time Budapest saw a flood of new arrivals. This was driven in part by a euphoric sense of freedom, or their grim dislocation through the collapse of old inefficient state enterprises in which they had been employed. This resulted in Budapest being confronted with a series of complex, at times interlocking problems that would have tested the skills of an experienced city government, instead it had newly elected leaders busy defining their respective powers, inexperienced in working within a democratic political culture and confronted with economic decisions for which there was no precedent. The problems with which Budapest was confronted in 1989-90 and the way it managed them are still issues for Budapest today. Hence they are a key theme of this book, a theme that repeated itself in the other major cities of the now ex-Communist bloc.

What made these problems, or at least their management or solution even less tractable was a more profound moral issue, namely the absence or weakness of civil society and public morality. The traditional morality of Judaic-Christian bourgeois culture, which more or less is still the yardstick for Western countries, though by no means always practised, was consciously undermined by the Communist regime to be replaced by the superior morality of a homo sovieticus. In Hungary, in fact in much of eastern Europe, this did not succeed, and in the final phase of the Communist era it gave way to Kadarism that